Bøker utgitt av NeWest Press

Having escaped the place in her youth, retired professor Sidonie von Täler returns to her ancestral Okanagan valley orchards still very much in the shadow of her deceased older sister Alice. As she sifts through the detritus of her family history, Sidonie is haunted by memories of trauma and triumph in equal measure, and must reconcile past and present while reconnecting with the people she left behind. Karen Hofmann's debut novel blends a poetic sensibility with issues of land stewardship, social stratification and colonialism. Her eye for period detail and characterisation is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin or Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, while her lyrical realisation of bygone B.C. pastoralia recalls the work of George Bowering.

In a flash, everything changes. After a group of radical environmentalists breaks into the house of a prominent oil company executive and holds him and his family hostage, the stage is set for a popular movement to coalesce around the incident. They call themselves "Tarstoppers", and by occupying Calgary''s parks and public areas they hope to shut down the oilsands. But even the most cynical of their number couldn''t anticipate what happened next. Now Tim and Shannon, an ordinary couple caught up in the middle of history, must navigate a world newly populated with fifth columnists, foreign radicals, agent provocateurs and black bloc anarchists as chaos ensues right outside their door.

As a long, hot Saskatchewan summer dawns, Darby Swank''s life is forever changed when she finds her beloved aunt floating dead in a lake. All at once, her blinders are lifted and she sees the country lifestyle she''s always known in a whole new way, with hidden pain and anguish lurking behind familiar faces, and violence forever threatening to burst forth, like brushfire smouldering and dormant under the muskeg. With her first novel, Lisa Guenther lays bare familial bonds, secret histories and the healing potential of art. This book the work of Ann-Marie MacDonald and Lynn Coady as it eviscerates small-town platitudes and brings important issues to light.

By turns tender and rough-hewn, and always structurally inventive, the poems in Wendy''s McGrath''s new collection show a writer reaching the height of her creative powers. Whether evoking the vulgar give-and-take of a men''s poker night, fleeting moments of connection between mothers and sons, afternoons spent in overgrown backyard gardens, or wondrous childhood trips to the drive-in, McGrath''s feel for the bygone details of working-class life is uncanny. The book''s highlight is the playful poetic sequence that gives the book its title, the product of a more-than-decade-long improvisational collaboration with printmaker Walter Jule, a series of not-quite-mirror poems whose meanings reflect on each other in kaleidoscopic ways.

Rebee Shore's life is fragmented. She's forever on the move, ricocheting around Alberta, guided less than capably by her dysfunctional mother Elizabeth. The Shore Girl follows Rebee from her toddler to her teen years as she grapples with her mother's fears and addictions, and her own desire for a normal life. Through a series of narrators--family, friends, teachers, strangers, and Rebee herself--her family's dark past, and the core of her mother's despair, are slowly revealed. The Shore Girl is a mosaic of Rebee: of her origins, of her past and present; from darkness and grief, to understanding and hope for a brighter future.

The politics of difference, mired in the violence of colonial history, are a dominant force in the socio-economic development of contemporary society as it strikes a balance between the acceptance of new cultures, and the absorption and gentrification of them. In this collection of essays edited by the University of Guelph's Smaro Kambourelli, Roy Miki -- poet, scholar, and member of the Order of Canada - investigates the shifting currents of citizenship, globalization, and cultural practices facing Asian Canadians today through the connections of place and identity that have been forged through our developing national literature.

Joelle is about to lose her husband Marc, who has become obsessed with Ketia, a young Haitian woman. Ketia lies to her family to conceal her liaison with Marc. Joelle 's friend Diane does not realize that her boyfriend Nazim has never told his Muslim family in Morocco about her. Then Nazim gets a letter that threatens his secret. Alice Zorn leads readers into the lives of a diverse cast of characters struggling with conflicting cultural values and the demands of intimacy. Set against the busy urban mosaic of Montreal, Arrhythmia is a study of betrayal: the large betrayals we commit against our loved ones, and the smaller ones we commit against ourselves.

"Three weeks it's been raining, but no puddles". Author Sara Pierce is slowly drowning in Windsor, a city where water will seemingly not stay put long enough to form puddles. While living with her germophobic best friend Angie and dealing with her online gaming-addicted boyfriend Dan, Sara finds herself obsessively writing and rewriting her own story in order to gain some sense of control over her life. Reading like John Barth by way of Lena Dunham, this is a portrait of the artist as a young woman trapped in a world she never imagined would end up this way. Marissa Reaume's playful debut is a novel that makes and unmakes itself at the same time, as strikethroughs and compulsive editorial injections take us into the mind of a young writer struggling to finally come into her own.